President-elect Donald Trump is in a stronger political position now than he was when he was poised to be sworn in for his first term, a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll finds, but he has yet to convince most Americans about the wisdom of some of his key campaign promises.
The survey taken on the cusp of his inauguration shows both the potential and the landmines as Trump becomes the first president since Grover Cleveland to win the White House, lose his reelection bid and then rebound to win it again.

“Keeps going back to the economy − I want him to fix it,” said Brandon Porria, 30, a political independent and information technology specialist from Hollister, California, who voted for Trump in November. He was among those called in the poll. “The one thing I don’t want him to do is, you know, be petty and … waste time going after people that might have had ill feelings toward him.”

Addressing the economy was overwhelmingly the public’s top priority on a list of seven issues, cited by 47%. Only immigration, at 21%, also broke into double digits.
The top two issues that voters said they didn’t want Trump to address were investigating Biden administration officials and congressional Democrats (24%) and issuing pardons for those indicted or convicted in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection (23%).

The poll of 1,000 registered voters, taken by landline and cellphone from Jan. 7 to 11, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
“My hope is that he becomes a little bit more like a team player; I hope he’s more middle ground,” Ashley Oliver, 38, an independent from Birmingham, Alabama, who voted for Democrat Kamala Harris, said of Trump. Oliver was encouraged when she saw the president-elect and former president Barack Obama chatting and smiling at last week’s state funeral for former president Jimmy Carter.
Trump continues to generate strong feelings, positive and negative.

While 31% said they felt “excited” about Trump taking office again, an equal 31% said they felt “afraid.”

Even so, that’s a more positive reading than in December 2016, in response to a similar question, when only 16% felt “excited” and 38% were “alarmed” by the prospect of Trump’s first term.
Americans skeptical of tax cuts, tariffs

Trump has said that one of his first legislative initiatives will be to extend and expand the tax cuts passed in his first term, now set to expire after this year.

But in the survey, a 53% majority of voters said Congress should focus on cutting the federal budget deficit, even if it meant not extending the tax cuts. Just 28% said Congress should extend the tax cuts even if it means increasing the deficit.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated that the 2017 Trump tax cuts added $1.9 trillion to the national debt.

Enthusiasm for tax cuts was relatively restrained even among Republicans: 46% put a higher priority on cutting taxes, and 38% on curbing the deficit.
Those surveyed by 52% to 45% said they approved of the job Trump did as president during his first term. That’s a rosier assessment than he ever received in the USA TODAY/Suffolk poll when he was in office.

His favorable-unfavorable rating is now tied at 47% to 47%. While the even split isn’t exactly glowing, it is better than his favorability in surveys taken in December 2016 when his rating was a net negative by five points, and in December 2020 when he had a net negative of 15 points.
The change over the past four years was particularly significant among independent voters.

“Donald Trump essentially wiped out his overwhelming negative personal popularity between December 2020 and today among independents,” said David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center. “Trump went from a whopping minus 22 (35% favorable ‒ 57% unfavorable) to a negligible minus 5 (42% favorable ‒ 47% unfavorable)” among the group that typically swings elections.